Attacking the Weak

ShouTime dumped the incredibly rare game Omega (Nihon System). It’s a ball-and-paddle game running on similar hardware to Sega’s Gigas. These games use an NEC MC-8123 CPU module containing a Z80 core, decryption circuitry, and an 8 KiB encryption key in battery-backed RAM. When fetching a byte from ROM or RAM, the CPU chooses a byte from the encryption key based on twelve of the address bits and whether it’s an M1 (opcode fetch) cycle or not. This byte from the encryption key controls what permutation (if any) is applied to the byte the CPU fetches. This encryption scheme could have been brutal, requiring extensive analysis of a working CPU module to crack, if it weren’t for a fatal flaw: Sega used a simple linear congruential generator algorithm to create 8 KiB keys from 24-bit seeds. That means there are less than seventeen million encryption keys to test. Seventeen million might sound like a lot, but it’s far less than the total possible number of keys, and definitely small enough to apply a known plaintext attack in a reasonable amount of time.

So how do we go about attacking it? First we have to make an assumption about what the game program is going to be doing. Given that the hardware looks pretty similar to Gigas and Free Kick, I guessed that one of the first things the program would do is write a zero somewhere to disable the non-maskable interrupt generator disable maskable interrupts. So I wrote a program to find candidate seeds (no, I won’t show you the source code for this program – it’s embarrassingly ugly and hacky, not something I could ever be proud of):

Start with first possible 24-bit seed value

Generate 8 KiB key using algorithm known to be used by Sega

Decrypt first few bytes of program ROM using this key

If it looks like Z80 code to store zero somewhere and disable interrupts, log the seed

Repeat for next possible seed value until we run out of values to try

This ran in just a few minutes on an i7 notebook, and narrowed down the millions of possible seed values to just five candidates: 36DF3D, 6F45E0, 7909D0, 861226, and BE78C9 (in hexadecimal notation). Now I could have tried these in order, but it looked like Sega had made another misstep: besides using a predictable algorithm to generate the key, they also used a predictable seed value to feed this algorithm. The candidate seeds value 861226 looks like a date in year-month-day format. It turns out this seed generates the correct key to decrypt the game program, so I guess we know what someone at Sega was doing the day after Christmas in 1986.

Brian Troha hooked up the peripheral emulation, and the game will be playable in MAME 0.183 (due for release on 22 February). Colours aren’t quite right as we don’t have dumps of the palette PROMs yet, but we expect to resolve this in a future release. Thanks to ShouTime and everyone else involved in preserving this very rare piece of arcade history.

Sorry, I don’t know the pinout – I started from a ROM dump. It’s likely similar to the other Nihon System games on the same platform like Free Kick and Gigas. You might be able to get a better answer on a forum like this one.